Newt Dances at the Mosqued Ball…

One thing I didn’t have room to get into in this week’s Comment was Newt Gingrich’s mugging of history.

According to Gingrich, the “true intentions” of the sponsors of Park51, the proposed Islamic community center in downtown Manhattan, are

revealed by the name initially proposed for the Ground Zero mosque—“Cordoba House”—which is named for a city in Spain where a conquering Muslim army replaced a church with a mosque. This name is a very direct historical indication that the Ground Zero mosque is all about conquest and thus an assertion of Islamist triumphalism which we should not tolerate.

Switching between his “man of the people” hat and his “scholar” hat with Bartholomew-like speed, Newt claims that “American élites” are guilty not only of “timidity” and “passivity” but also of “historic ignorance”:

For example, most of them don’t understand that “Cordoba House” is a deliberately insulting term. It refers to Cordoba, Spain—the capital of Muslim conquerors who symbolized their victory over the Christian Spaniards by transforming a church there into the world’s third-largest mosque complex.

Perhaps you have a vague impression that “Cordoba” might have been chosen for quite different reasons—reasons having to do with the relative tolerance (by medieval standards) of Moorish Andalusia. Andrew Sullivan’s indefatigable Web-crawlers at the Daily Dish point to a post by “an actual student of history,” Carl Pyrdum, who tells a far more complicated and interesting tale, the burden of which is that Gingrich’s version is “completely bogus.” Pyrdum, in turn, points to a couple of relevant passages from the 1917 edition of “The Catholic Encyclopedia.” Here’s one:

In 786 the Arab caliph, Abd-er Rahman I, began the construction of the great mosque of Cordova, now the cathedral, and compelled many Christians to take part in the preparation of the site and foundations. Though they suffered many vexations, the Christians continued to enjoy freedom of worship, and this tolerant attitude of the ameers seduced not a few Christians from their original allegiance. Both Christians and Arabs co-operated at this time to make Cordova a flourishing city, the elegant refinement of which was unequalled in Europe.

Skipping ahead a couple of centuries to the years after 962, the encyclopedia reports that “Owing to the peace which the Christians of Cordova then enjoyed,”

the citizens of Cordova, Arabs, Christians, and Jews, enjoyed so high a degree of literary culture that the city was known as the New Athens. From all quarters came students eager to drink at its founts of knowledge. Among the men afterwards famous who studied at Cordova were the scholarly monk Gerbert, destined to sit on the Chair of Peter as Sylvester II (999-1003), the Jewish rabbis Moses and Maimonides, and the famous Spanish-Arabian commentator on Aristotle, Averroes.

God knows, there was plenty of conflict and persecution before, after, and in between (even if religious minorities—e.g., Jews—fared better, on the whole, under Muslim than under Christian rule). Still, here’s Pyrdum’s takeaway:

So it’s easy to see why a group of Muslims creating a community center in the heart of a majority Christian country in a city known for its large Jewish population might name it “The Cordoba House” They’re not, as Gingrich hopes we would believe, discreetly laughing at us because “Cordoba” is some double-secret Islamist code for “conquest”; rather, they’re hoping to associate themselves with a particular time in medieval history when the largest library in Western Europe was to be found in Cordoba, a city in which scholars of all three major Abrahamic religions were free to study side-by-side.

Too bad the sponsors allowed themselves to be bullied into abandoning the original name. “Cordoba House” is pleasing to the ear. Also, its historical resonances are apt. Just not in the way that Newt professes to believe.

Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior editor and staff writer at The New Yorker. He regularly blogs about politics.